 is an electrical engineering degree worth it. That's what we're going to be talking about today, but before we get into that, make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. On this channel, we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers, and opportunities that are going to lead you to success. And we also go over how you can avoid some of the common financial traps that so many people end up falling for. Now, if that sounds like something that interests you and you haven't done it already, you know what to do. Go ahead, hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss out. With that being said, first thing we need to do is define what electrical engineering is. Basically, anything where you use electricity in order to solve problems is going to be related to electrical engineering. This is going to be all about the implementation, control, design, et cetera of electrical equipment. This is one of the more common engineering bachelor degrees with around 16,000 people graduating every year. And there really are a ton of different career paths that you can go down with this degree as you can imagine just about everything around us involves electricity. Next, we're gonna move on to salary or earning potential. So with an electrical engineering degree, you'd expect to make around $71,000 a year starting off at 121,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare that to the highest paying degree and one of the lowest paying degrees and you see that it's very good. I generally recommend that you try to aim for a degree or a career where you can make at least $75,000 a year because studies have shown that that will maximize your happiness. In other words, your happiness does in fact decrease the more money you make up until a certain point which is around 75,000 a year or so. Now, if you became an electrical engineer, they make around $101,000 a year. That's pretty good, of course, but there's a ton of different career options you could go down. You could become another type of engineer, for instance, like a biomedical engineer and they make around 91,000. And engineers in general make much more than your average degree, about $3.5 million over a lifetime versus 2.4 million for all of the other types of majors. But like I said, there's a ton of different career paths you can go down. I'll have a few of them pop up on the screen but there's a lot more than this. And you don't just make a lot of money from the salary rate this one. A lot of people will end up starting their own business which will give you the opportunity to make much more than you ever could with a job. So overall, this one is definitely going to be a 10 out of 10 when it comes to earning potential or salary. Now, when it comes to satisfaction, I like to break things down into a few different metrics. Job satisfaction and meaning are the two most important things in my opinion. So when you look at meaning, which is how much your career positively impacts the world, you see electrical engineering degree graduates have a score of around 55%. You can compare this to a really good score and a really bad score. And you'll see that it's average or above average. Those who end up becoming electrical engineers have a score of around 58%, which again is above average. However, the job satisfaction tends to be on the higher side. It comes in at around 72%. And again, you can compare that to a career that has really high satisfaction and a one that has really low satisfaction. And you'll see that overall, it comes out as above average. Now, there's a lot of different career paths you can go down with this, which is a good thing. A lot of the time, people who get engineering degrees don't end up becoming engineers, but there's a lot of job opportunities out there for them because engineering is so well respected. Companies pretty much know that they're getting a really hard-working, really smart, practical problem solver when they hire someone with an engineering degree. And overall, engineering is the third least regretted type of degree if you compare them to all different types. Only around 15% of people regret getting the degree and the main reason is because the best jobs out there require advanced degrees like a master's or a doctorate. However, I always like to say here that this is the most subjective section and a lot of the time it's gonna have more to do with the company you work for, the people you work with, the career you're in, the industry you're in, et cetera. It's also extremely subjective from person to person. So if you don't like math, you probably don't wanna go into engineering. But with that being said, all things being equal and using objective standards, I'm gonna have to give this one a pretty good score of eight out of 10. Next, we're gonna be talking about demand. And this is basically how much your skills that you learn from whatever degree you get are going to be coveted by businesses and hiring managers out there. So basically how many positions are open for a certain experience level or skill sets and then how many people are out there that can actually fill those positions. If there's not enough people, it's simple law of supply and demand and they're gonna have to pay you better and they'll likely treat you better as well just because there's not enough people and they want to keep you. So when it comes to demand, if you wanna become an electrical engineer, they are growing at about 3% and that's with 328,000 jobs available already, meaning over the next 10 years, there's gonna be 10,800 new jobs that pop up. For bioengineer, it'll be around 21,000 jobs right now. It's growing a little bit faster than average at around 5%, meaning over the next 10 years, there's gonna be 1,000 jobs that pop up. So one thing you'll notice here is engineering degrees are usually growing around average or maybe a little faster than average, which isn't all that impressive when you compare them to technology or healthcare degrees. With tech or healthcare degrees and careers that you end up going into, a lot of the time they're growing at 10%, 20%, sometimes you'll even see 30% over the next 10 years. And so you might think a lot of these engineering degrees are overrated, but when you look into it a little bit more, you see that many people who get these degrees end up going into completely unrelated careers that still tend to pay pretty well. This is because a lot of companies have the hiring philosophy that you wanna hire the smartest people and not necessarily people that are trained for that specific job. This is very common in the finance industry, for instance, where they basically just wanna get the smartest and most talented people, and then they think that they can teach them the particular skills they need to know later on. And they pretty much know that if you can make it through a rigorous engineering curriculum, then you're probably gonna be very smart and also hardworking. So with that being said, when you search the term electrical engineering degrees on monster.com, you're gonna see that 23,000 job offers pop up. You can compare this to a degree that's an extremely high demand like computer science or one that's not in demand at all like anthropology. And 23,000 is actually really good. Computer science is a total outlier in this equation, but 23,000 is gonna be in the top like 95th percentile easily. So there's a lot of people out there that are looking for the skill set of people who graduate with an electrical engineering degree. On top of that, there's a survey I like to reference from NACE where they basically contacted a bunch of the top companies in the United States and they asked them what type of graduates they're looking to hire. There's a couple of different surveys and the two types of degrees that are most commonly at the top were business and engineering degrees. Sometimes business was number one and sometimes engineering was number one. And so there's clearly a lot of demand here and electrical engineering is gonna be one of the more flexible types of engineering degrees as well. So there's a lot of different areas that you can go with it. A lot of people will end up going into the technology industry, working on hardware. Sometimes even doing software engineering. So this one is gonna score pretty well here. I'm gonna give it a nine out of 10. Next on the list, we're gonna be talking about X factors. And this is anything that we didn't talk about before. Usually I talk about automation, outsourcing, skills, flexibility, et cetera. So first of all, pretty much everybody knows this. Engineers over a lifetime make more money than any other type of degree. The average degree recipient is gonna earn around $2.4 million over a lifetime, whereas the average engineering grad will earn 3.5 million. So what's great about engineering degrees is not only do you earn more if you become an engineer, you go into some kind of technical skill, even if you go into something like art, you're gonna earn 3 million over a lifetime. And this just goes to show, there's something about getting an engineering degree that makes people really successful. It could be that people who go for those types of degrees would have been successful anyways, or it could be that the types of skills you learn are really transferable, pretty much any career you go into. Could be correlation or causation. Nobody really knows for sure, but in my opinion it has a little bit to do with both. Now, when you look at electrical engineering as a skill set, you'll see that it's one of the highest paid types of skills according to Zip Recruiters Skills Index. It comes in ranked 73, and the best possible skill is 88 out of 100, and the worst one is around eight out of 100. So you see that that's definitely on the higher side. So what that basically means is businesses are willing to pay people who have this skill set really good money. It's pretty much simple supply and demand. There's not a lot of people who have this skill set and businesses need people who have those skills, and so therefore they're willing to pay them more. Now, it comes to automation. Electrical engineers likely will not be automated. There's probably about a 10% chance or so, which is on the lower side. And when it comes to outsourcing, it would also be very difficult to do this because it's really creative work, and you kind of have to be in-person, talking to other people, bouncing ideas off of each other, and touching stuff in real life in order to make it work. I always like to mention that engineering degrees are the number one degree that creates the most millionaires, and there's a reason for that. Part of it, of course, has to do with the high salary and the fact that you're going into careers where you're making a lot of money, but I think even more important than that is because of the fact that engineers make really good entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship at its core is basically just problem solving and engineering is practical problem solving. A lot of the time, a people will get a few years of experience, learn some skills, and then they'll recognize an opportunity, they'll quit their job, or maybe they won't quit their job, they'll just do it on the side as a side hustle, and then eventually they become successful and they start a business that does really well. Engineering degrees not only create the most millionaires, but they also create the most billionaires, so you can kind of see why that is. Engineering is extremely flexible and electrical is one of the more flexible types. A lot of people will end up working in the technology industry, for instance, you might become a software developer or something along those lines. Now, when it comes to difficulty, engineering degrees are extremely difficult, so keep that in mind, there's a very high dropout rate, so you need to be ready for that. Overall, I'm going to give this one a score of nine out of 10. It's really, really good. So some of the positives here, the pay is going to be fantastic. There's a lot of different career paths you can go down. It's one of the most flexible types of engineering degrees. There's also going to be a good amount of job demand just right off the bat for careers that are related to electrical engineering. Some of the cons is that it's going to be highly stressful. Engineering degrees are very difficult to get and this is something you want to keep in mind. There's a high dropout rate for a reason and some of the better paying careers and career opportunities, especially if you want to go into electrical engineering specifically, might require advanced level degrees. So overall, I'm going to give this one an excellent score of nine out of 10. This is a very, very good degree. Of course, you don't want to go into it. If you're not the right person for it, you need to make sure that it matches you specifically because a lot of this is going to be very subjective and different from person to person. But with that being said, this is a pretty good one because even if you end up not wanting to become an electrical engineer, it's flexible enough that you can go in all kinds of different directions. Now, if there's a degree that you want to know about, but you don't have time to wait for me to make a video on it, check out my college degree ranker down in the description. It's only in version 1.1 right now. I'm kind of waiting until things calm down in the world before I make version two or even add on to version 1.1. But at this point, I think it is the best resource out there. It's the resource that I wish that I had when I was 18 years old, studying different college degrees, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. Check that out. Down in the description, it's going to be in my Patreon. And if you haven't done it already, gently tap the like button, hit that subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video. Sharing the video actually helps quite a bit with the algorithm. That's awesome if you share it with someone who might need the help. And whatever you do, don't leave. Check out my videos right here. I made them just for you.